Wednesday, 16 October 2019

The Seduction and Horror of War

“You will see the effect upon people. They will acclaim it with enthusiasm; everybody is already looking forward to the first onslaught—so dull have their lives become.

—Herman Hesse, Damian

"One of the most troubling reasons men love war is the love of destruction, the thrill of killing...all you do is move the finger so imperceptibly, just a wish flashing across your mind like a shadow, not even a full brain synapse, and poof, in a blast of sound and energy and light a truck or a house or even people disappear, everything flying and settling back into dust."

—William Broyles, "Why Men Love War," Esquire, November1984, veteran of the Vietnam War

"Oh! What a Lovely War does recreate this time, in a bitter
mixture of history, satire, detail, panorama and music.

Especially music. There is something paradoxical in the thought
of singing about a war, and yet cheap popular songs often capture the spirit of
a time better than any collection of speeches and histories. Miss (Joan) Littlewood (in the 1963 stage production),
and (Richard) Attenborough after her, present the war as a British music hall review;
there's a lot of smiling up front, but backstage you can see the greasepaint
and smell the sweat, and the smiles become desperate, and there begins to be
blood.

This sense is captured most tellingly in Maggie Smith's scene.
She plays a robust, patriotic broad who lures the young men from the audience
to the stage with promises of love and implications of heroic death. But death
is reserved for the young, not for the old, and John Mills (as Sir Douglas
Haig) stays far behind the lines, studying the front from an observation tower.
Meanwhile, politicians, kings and rulers play stupid games of diplomacy and
etiquette, and 'acceptable losses' are counted in the hundreds of
thousands. But always everyone whistles a happy tune...."

"The picture of the country 100 years ago is often unwholesome in ways that, again, resonate with current turmoil. Prejudice against immigrants ran high. Anti-German feelings were virulent, and Wilson issued orders requiring the registration of all German-born residents (a program administered by the 22-year-old J. Edgar Hoover).

Americans were encouraged to spy on and report one another for violations of voluntary rationing programs or failure to buy war bonds. The government engaged in a sophisticated large-scale propaganda campaign enforcing loyalty. A poster shown in the film asks, in menacing capital letters, “Are You 100% American?”

Watching “The Great War” can give you a sense of a full circle of events. If this was how America became the world’s pre-eminent power, is this also how it surrenders the role?"

— Mike Hale,"‘The Great War,’When America Took the World Stage,"The
New York TimesApril 2017

A World War I documentary in 3D with
colorized archival footage that looks as new as the day it was shot. What
sounds like an impossible feat becomes a riveting reality in the hands of
director Peter Jackson and his New
Zealand Weta crew of restoration miracle workers, led by digital VFX supervisor
Wayne Stables. In They
Shall Not Grow Old, the lord of The Lord of the Rings uses a treasure
trove of material — more than 600 hours worth — from England’s Imperial War
Museum to bring the Great War to vivid life.

"Through original
diaries, letters, and memoirs, this unforgettable documentary tells how the
lives of regular British men and women were transformed by the Great War. A
reservist leaves for the front determined to write to his mother every few
days. A newlywed says goodbye to his pregnant wife. A young woman fears that
when her fiancé sails for France, her hopes of marriage will disappear. For
parents and children, soldiers and factory workers alike, life and love go on
but never again as they did before. Few could imagine the horrors ahead:
hundreds of thousands would never return, and those who did would carry
wounds-physical, emotional, psychological- that would change their lives
forever.

Along with historical footage, an outstanding cast of actors
reenact first-hand accounts uncovered from attics, archives, and libraries
across Britain. Performers include Daniel Mays (Ashes to Ashes), Matthew
McNulty (The Paradise), Claire Foy (Little Dorrit), Romola Garai (Emma), Alison
Steadman (Pride and Prejudice), and Brian Cox (The Bourne Supremacy). Narrated
by Olivia Colman (Broadchurch), this four-part series re-creates the
extraordinary stories of ordinary people, told in their own words."

"Over three days of fighting in March of
1918, British soldiers stuck in the WWI trenches of northern France and their
commanding officers quartered below await a German attack. Raleigh (Hugo‘s
Asa Butterfield), an inexperienced 19-year-old officer, had actually requested
to join C Company, led his much-beloved former school housemaster and
prospective brother-in-law Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin). The latter tries to
hide his rattling insecurities and mask his depression in booze and the counsel
of his second in command, Osborne (Paul Bettany). Before the war, the
lieutenant was teacher and family man with a knack for holding things together,
or trying to, at least. But the brass know this will result in near-total
casualties. It’s just a matter of when the bombs are going to start falling....

The vise-like tension
grows out of the waiting, punctuated by bursts of action that achieve an
explosive impact enhanced by their brevity. The play stayed mostly with the
officers. But the film, drawing more on the later novel by Sherriff and Vernon
Bartlett, opens up the action and expands to let us see every man facing his
own individual fears....

Journey’s End is a bleak, sobering experience that puts audiencesthrough a wringer. It’s also an emotional powerhouse you will
not forget."

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Based on Pat Barker's novel of the same name, Regeneration (later renamed Behind the Lines when released in DVD) tells the story of World War One British officers suffering from shell shock who are sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, including poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The centerpiece of this novel/drama is the perceptive and wise physician William Rivers.

Testament of Youth

"Testament of
Youth, James Kent’s stately screen adaptation of the British
author Vera Brittain’s 1933 World War I memoir, evokes the march of history
with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.
Most similar films strain at the seams with bombast and sentimentality....

The movie is also the
stronger for having no battle sequences or scenes depicting acts of courage,
though you hear about such heroics after the fact. There are just enough shots
of life in the trenches to give a glimpse of a hell, peopled by exhausted,
mud-covered soldiers who are almost unrecognizable from the vital young men who
left Britain thinking they were bound for glory. Other scenes in army hospitals
in England and behind the lines in France are unrelievedly grim tableaus.

Testament of Youth might be described as a feminist war film,
because it is saturated with Vera’s frustration at her parents’ limited
ambitions for her and later with her contempt for war. It isn’t until the end
that she delivers a scathing antiwar diatribe."

"Deafening is the story of Grania, a little girl growing up on the shores of the Bay of Quinte in southern Ontario in the early years of the 20th century, who is struck deaf by scarlet fever at the age of five.

It’s also the story of Jim, her hearing husband who, shortly after their honeymoon, leaves to play his part in the Great War in Europe. Itani’s theme throughout this quietly lovely novel is the complexity of sound and silence and how they can be both blessing and curse to the humans who experience them. "

— An unnamed reviewer in Quill and Quire. This novel is I believe one of the best novels on the war.

Franz

"There are a few
fits and starts, and a palette switch from black-and-white to color. But (
Francois) Ozon is onto something about nationalism, borders and a hatred of the
other that’s as timely as Trump.

Ozon’s script, adapted from a play by Maurice
Rostand written before the (Ernst) Lubitsch 1932 film (Broken Lullaby), is anchored by an image of a
Frenchman putting flowers on the grave of a German soldier. The time is 1919,
just after the World War I – and the point of view has now been switched from
the French victors to the German losers. Anna, powerfully played by German star
Paula Beer, is mourning her fiancée Frantz (Anton von Lucke, in flashbacks) ,
who was killed in the trenches. She lives with her late beau’s parents, Dr.
Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner) and his wife Magda (Marie Gruber). Anna is a
keeper of the flame, so the sight of a Gallic gent named Adrien (Pierre Niney),
the one leaving roses by Frantz’s tombstone, startles her. Dr. Hofffmeister
instinctively sees the stranger as the enemy (“all Frenchmen killed my only
son”), but slowly warms – as does Anna – to his tales of her soldier boyfriend
in Paris before the war, where the two men visited the Louvre and spent hours
discussing Manet’s painting “Le Suicidé.” Ozon keeps the homoerotic
possibilities between Adrien and Frantz as subtext. And Anna’s attraction to
this mysterious stranger leads her to follow him to Paris after they part on a
note of brutal truth."

"Babylon Berlin (on Netflix) is an exhilarating, gritty sixteen-part
series that is a mash-up of genres. On the most basic level, it is a propulsive
police procedural and political thriller that has been adapted from the crime
novel of the same name by Volker Kutscher (Picador, translated in 2016), the
first in a series planned by the author culminating with the 1938
Kristallnacht. More importantly, the drama – reportedly the most expensive
German television production involving three directors in every episode – is a
vivid evocation of 1929 Berlin accented with film noir a few months before the
crash of the American stock market. Ten years after the end of the Great War
veterans still carry its scars; the war's consequences accelerate extremist
politics from the left and the right threatening the rule of law and
destabilizing the fragility of the Weimar Republic; pockets of poverty in the
city remain with its attendant political and social ramifications, particularly
for vulnerable women; and the attempt to blot out a humiliating defeat and for
most Germans a shameful peace treaty explain in part its frenetic cultural,
social and sexual life. Very little of the political, social and cultural
tapestry of Berlin portrayed in the series is based on the novel. The series
other strength is its focus on character development that enables the actors to
grow into their roles and deliver strong performances."

"Metropolis is the 14th book in the critically acclaimed and
award-winning Bernie Gunther series from the late Philip Kerr. However, this
tale is more a prequel as it outlines the early years of a young Bernie as a
detective in Berlin, unaware of the horrors that will await him in the coming
days.

It is 1928 and Berlin is a modern Babylon, bursting with artistic
creativity as well as unprecedented sexual freedom, yet also witnessing of
virulent anti-Semitism, anti-immigration, and anti-gay fervor, and street
battles between political extremists on the right and the left. The Weimar Republic is
nearing its end, and a monster called Hitler is about to make his appearance....

Like Bernie, Berlin’s people are still suffering from the
devastating psychic and physical wounds of World War I, with which he is only
too well acquainted from his hell on the Western Front. Even mundane things
like cigar smoke still brings flashbacks of the bloody nightmare of four years
of trench warfare....

Metropolis is
Kerr’s and Bernie’s swan song—a brilliant Berlin opera...with an intricate and
riveting plot. And just like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Philip
Kerr’s Metropolis is a masterpiece."

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That Line of Darkness: Vol. 2

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About Me

Author of That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions (2012) and second volume, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions (2013).